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U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions believes that access to marijuana should be more restricted than access to guns.

That’s the response he gave to a Justice Department intern who pressed him on the Trump administration’s handling of the two issues.

“Statistically guns kill significantly more people than marijuana does,” the intern said during a Q & A session with the attorney general. “You support pretty harsh policies for marijuana and pretty lax gun control laws.”

Fifty-one percent of Republicans surveyed by Gallup this month said they support legalization, up sharply from 42 percent a year ago. Even larger majorities of independents (67 percent) and Democrats (72 percent) are in favor of legal marijuana.

Overall, 64 percent of Americans now support legalization, the highest percentage ever in Gallup polling.

People eager to start buying recreational marijuana from shops in San Francisco when sales become legal throughout the state in January are going to have to wait a little longer.

The city won’t issue permits to sell recreational marijuana until it passes new laws to regulate the industry and creates an equity program to help low-income entrepreneurs, people of color, and former drug offenders break into the market.

According to Supervisor Jeff Sheehy, who introduced an ordinance with proposed regulations at Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting, city officials still have no idea what that program will look like or how it will operate.

The Trump administration is continuing to weigh whether or not to reverse Obama-era guidance that generally allows states to legalize marijuana without federal interference, the Justice Department's number two official said on Thursday.

"We are reviewing that policy. We haven't changed it, but we are reviewing it. We're looking at the states that have legalized or decriminalized marijuana, trying to evaluate what the impact is," Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said in an appearance at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

A Senate panel is urging several federal agencies to undertake a series of moves, which include providing ways to test marijuana products sold at dispensaries in states where cannabis is legal.

Based on concerns over the lack of information on the potency and purity of cannabis being sold to consumers, the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee is directing federal agencies to formulate a “National Testing Program for Schedule I Marijuana-Derived Products,” according to Forbes.

In a recent report, senators instructed scientists at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) to work with the DEA to analyze marijuana samples and “provide robust reliable data that can inform policy.”

Until recently, research scientists analyzed illegal drugs provided by the government under a NIDA-funded program of testing samples of illicit marijuana seized by law enforcement.

SAN FRANCISCO — Marijuana legalization just moved from the fringes of the last presidential campaign to center stage in 2020.

Between a sweeping new package of legislation introduced last week by one of the top Democratic presidential prospects and, on the other end of the spectrum, Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ vigorous opposition to recreational use of marijuana, the debate over legalization of cannabis is about to receive a full airing on the presidential campaign trail.

While Bernie Sanders also supported medicinal use of marijuana and the decriminalization of recreational marijuana, drug policy stayed on the outskirts of the 2016 presidential debate, and growing action at the state level was barely acknowledged.